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I have accrued many debts in the preparation of this article. Two anonymous readers provided helpful suggestions for revision. Daniel Immerwahr organized the panel on which I first presented some of the ideas herein and supplied helpful comments on a near-final version of the manuscript. Dustin Walcher served as an early sounding board. Richard Franklin Bensel, Richard John, and Daniel Sargent provided valuable feedback on an early version, while Lloyd Ambrosius, Christopher Capozzola, Ira Katznelson, and Jay Sexton soldiered through a much longer later version. My MA students at Rutgers–Camden helped me to refine my ideas. John Krige arranged for me to present an early version of the article at Georgia Tech, and I am grateful to both him and his colleagues for their questions and suggestions. I am similarly indebted to the participants at a workshop on a new Cambridge History of America in the World volume for their advice. I am especially obliged to John A. Thompson, who, despite disagreeing with my arguments in some respects, graciously supplied line edits and comments in an effort to help me to improve the piece. Above all, I thank Brooke Blower for her exceptionally valuable editorial guidance. Any errors that remain are my own.
Reports of the rise of the United States to a lead role on the global stage in the early twentieth century have been greatly exaggerated. As many Americans at the time recognized, the United States continued to have less capacity for overseas power projection and remained far more dependent on the world's reigning hegemon, Great Britain, than is generally now realized. The United States, it is true, acquired an overseas empire in 1898. But it lacked the basic attributes of a great power, such as economic sovereignty, naval power, and domestic consensus on the desirability of global great-power status. Even after World War I, which was a better candidate than the Spanish-American War as the moment when the United States became a leading global power, both the material and the cultural basis of that power remained fragile.
Scholars have overstated U.S. power at the turn of the century, not least because they tend to measure it in terms of industrialization. The United States unquestionably became a great industrial power in the late-nineteenth...